Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas Eve 2015 and a New Toy: Universe2Go

Got some Christmas money burning a hole in your pocket? Want
a groovy new astronomy toy? I may have
just the thing for you, the Universe2Gofrom Omegon in Germany (available
through Amazon.com in the U.S.). Actually, calling it a “toy” doesn’t quite do
it justice, though that word does hint at the fun built into it. The U2G may,
however, be more than just fun, it could be the start of something big, the
first real personal planetarium. Before
we get to that, however, let’s have the trad report on Christmas Eve ‘round
these parts.

There’s not really too much to tell, actually. If you’ve
glanced at the Weather Channel, you know my part of the country, the Gulf Coast,
is being pummeled by intense thunderstorms and rain. Not the sort of weather
that encourages you to get out and battle the crazy Christmas Eve traffic even
if you can find a restaurant open post lunch. So, ‘twas a quiet evening at home
with a glass or two of red wine, A
Charlie Brown Christmas on DVD, and Jessica Jones
on Netflix (quite a combo, I know). There was not a prayer of getting my
traditional Christmas Eve look at M42. The only observing I was able to do, or
had been able to do for days, was of the virtual
sort.

Virtual observing with the Universe2Go, that is. What is that? It is the logical extension of
one of the more popular features of smart phone/tablet astronomy apps,
gyro-accelerometer “tracking” of the sky.
You know, go outside under the night sky with your phone or tablet,
start SkySafari or one of the many
other apps that has this feature, hold the widget up to the night sky, and
enable tracking. If everything is as it should
be, the virtual sky will display the stars and constellations of the real sky
before you. As you move the phone across the sky, its virtual sky changes to
reflect your movements.

Pretty neat, and useful too. Many’s the time that I’ve used
this feature of SkySafari to identify a star or planet at dusk. It is the near perfection
of the idea developed by Meade and Celestron some years ago with their
standalone MySky and SkyScout devices, and it
is also the reason those products are no longer with us. The sky-tracking
feature of cell phone astro-apps made the hardware “personal planetariums”
obsolete.

What if you took this idea one more step, though, combining something
like the MySky with the tracking feature of astro-apps? That’s what Universe2Go
does. And in a very simple way. What it is at heart is a simple plastic box. Or
maybe a better description is a Viewmaster
Viewer—if like Unk you are old enough to remember those old kids’ 3D slide viewers.

Instead of a slide, though, you insert your smart phone into
this viewer with the Universe2Go app running, and, thanks to the viewer’s beam-splitter
arrangement, you see the app’s stars, constellations, and deep sky objects
seemingly projected against the real night sky as you scan across it in
binocular fashion. Even better, thanks to the fact that you are looking at two
images, one projected for each eye, you can view the apps stars and DSOs in 3D
if you wish.

The Universe2Go hardware viewer is clever enough but hardly
revolutionary. What makes this thing go is the application that comes with it.
While it still has a few rough edges—it locked up on me once on my iPhone 6s—it
is capable of fairly amazing things, and if the people who make U2G continue to
develop it, I believe it will become truly revolutionary, the ultimate personal
planetarium.

What can it do now? It can operate in numerous modes,
including “beginner,” an introduction to the night sky, “mythology,” which
outlines the stories in the sky, and “deep sky,” which highlights deep sky
objects. There is literally hours of narration to go along with the visuals,
and that is well done by a female narrator who, while evidently not a
native English speaker, almost made me
think she was. I enjoyed listening to her tell me all about the bright stars
and the planets and the constellation figures, but being a deep sky hound, what
I really was anxious to try was the U2G’s Deep Sky Mode.

In the deep sky mode, little thumbnail images of the brighter
objects are sprinkled amongst the stars and in their proper positions. Let me
tell you, it was quite a trip to scan across the night sky, see the
constellation lines projected before me, the stars labeled, and DSOs invisible
to my naked eyes appear as small pictures. It got even better though.

Stopping on one of the 150 objects that have images
associated with them and selecting it (more on that below) enlarged the little
fuzzy to a big, beautiful picture floating before my eyes, and I was then treated
to a narration giving the object’s vital statistics. While I ran across a few
minor factual errors in that narration, they were relatively few.

You don’t need a clear night to enjoy a deep sky tour with
the U2G; this mode (like the others) is almost as much fun to play with in a
darkened room—which is what I did most of the time since the moment the U2G
arrived so did the clouds (I hope to do more extensive outdoor testing soon). While only
150 DSOs have images to go with them, the entire Messier and NGC are there as
symbols.

Whether I was just scanning across the constellations or
homing in on faint fuzzies, I had a ball. I won’t say using the U2G was quite like
sitting under a planetarium dome, but it was the next best thing, and maybe the
closest thing to it if you don’t have a Zeiss dumbbell projector in your living
room.

Is the Universe2Go an unqualified success, then? No, but
what is? The down-checks come in two areas, the first of which concerns set up.
Before the U2G can do any of its great things, you have to get it going, and
doing that is not quite a simple as just opening the hatch in the viewer,
popping your phone inside, and closing the plastic door. While not tremendously
difficult, installing and aligning my iPhone 6s in the U2G was not exactly a
walk in the park either.

The initial challenge you will confront is installation of your
phone in the viewer. To begin, you will likely need to remove your phone from
its case, since otherwise it will be too thick to allow you to close the door
on the viewer, and the phone will not be held firmly in place. How much of a
hassle removing your phone from its case before every use of the device is depends
on the case. For me, getting my iPhone out of its Otterbox was a pain, but that
is not the fault of the U2G.

Next, you have to ensure the phone is held snugly in the
viewer. Since the viewer is made to accommodate a fairly wide range of iOS and
Android smart phones (excluding big ones like the iPhone 6s Plus and the Galaxy
Note), you have to use included die-cut, self adhesive weather-stripping-like
foam material to hold your particular smart phone securely in the viewer’s top compartment.
The foam material is cut in rectangles and triangles, and at first it looks as
if it will be easy to use. Not so. I found getting the foam properly pasted down
a pain.

I was able to find a set of foam pieces (one rectangle and
two triangular shapes) that did a good job of holding my phone in place and
positioning it squarely with regard to the viewer. Unfortunately, getting the
pieces correctly permanently positioned wasn’t easy. Oh, they stuck to the
plastic well—too well. Touch an adhesive surface to the viewer and it was stuck
but good and could not be re-positioned without tearing it. Nevertheless, after
some cussing I was able to get the foam arranged, more or less.

How could phone installation be improved? There is a relatively
small number of phones people will use with this device, and my suggestion is
that Omegon offer the U2G tailored for each particular smart phone, with foam
specially designed for a given model already installed.

When you have that darned foam in place, you fire up the
application on your phone (you download it from iTunes or Google Play; it’s
free with the purchase of the U2G and is activated with a code found in the box
with the viewer). You still aren’t ready to start having fun with your personal
planetarium, though. Next step is calibration,
making sure the images seen in the viewer with your two eyes merge.

That brings us to the U2G’s other major annoyance: the way
you move a cursor around onscreen and access and select menus. Your phone is in
the viewer and there is no way for you to touch the screen or push a button.
Instead, you navigate menus and do the calibration using your phone’s
gyro/accelerometer.

A combination of nodding your head up and down and tilting
it from side to side moves the cursor and enters selections. In the beginning I
found this well-night impossible to do, and didn’t think I’d ever manage to
complete the calibration—which involves nodding and tilting your head till two bull’s-eye
targets merge. I was just about ready to quit after my fifth attempt when I finally
caught on to how to move my head, finished calibration, and was soon flipping
through menus and finishing the device’s simple setup with fair ease.

By the time I finished setting up the U2G, I was in something
of a snit, but as soon as I began
zooming ‘round the night sky indoors and out, all that went away. This thing
truly is remarkable, especially if
you, like me, have always wanted a home planetarium that’s a little better than
a darned old Spitz Junior. It is really rather breathtaking as it is, and,
again, if the people at Omegon continue to work on their app I believe
“breathtaking” will be too mild a word.

There’s but one final impediment to having a virtual
planetarium at your beck and call day and night via the Universe2Go: the price. The U2G will set you back nearly
one-hundred dollars. Is it worth that much? That depends on you. The ground
truth is that you can get a far more capable and detailed planetarium program—far more detailed—SkySafari Pro, for half that amount. And how much is that plastic 3D
viewer box really worth? You will have to decide that for yourself, but I will say that when you’ve got the U2G
working you will be flat out astounded at how cool it is. SkySafari is
beautiful, and useful, but U2G is just so
much fun.

Friday, December 18, 2015

A Pre Christmas Break...

I intended to post a blog article as usual for this coming Sunday, but, alas, a Christmas vacation got in the way. That was maybe not a bad thing, since it will allow me more time to evaluate a rather interesting product, Universe2Go, which I will present to you next time. Have a great week-before-Christmas and watch out for the crazy drivers. I will see you on Christmas Eve as usual...

Sunday, December 13, 2015

A Revolution in Affordable Video Imaging…

As most of you know, astronomical video imaging, “deep sky
video,” is my bag. While I’ve mostly been doing DSLR/CCD astrophotography the last year
or so, I’ve never lost my love for video.

A sensitive vid-cam makes it so easy to go incredibly
deep. With my humble C11 and CGEM and Mallincam, for example, capturing 17th magnitude and dimmer Quasars
was nothing. The only limitation seemed to be me becoming bored with one more insanely distant bluish, star-like object. I haven’t just practiced
video, either. I’ve preached about
the “video revolution” here, in the pages of Sky & Telescope, and on our observing fields.

So why isn’t every deep sky crazy amateur astronomer using
video cameras? There are a couple of reasons. First, some people just like
looking through an eyepiece. Video delivers faint objects in such short
exposures that it almost seems like you are observing in real time, but for some it still
ain’t the same as eye and eyepiece.

The nay-sayers are not necessarily a majority, however. There
are plenty of amateurs who would love to see detail in the brighter deep sky
objects from the light-polluted backyard, capture dim and
challenging DSOs from darker sites, and use video in public outreach. Unfortunately, there’s been one big thing preventing them from doing all that: m-o-n-e-y. For the
longest time, one thousand dollars was the video admission price, with
close to two-thousand being more realistic for a capable camera.

Those economics began to change a few years ago with the
release of bargain oriented astro-vidcams, first in the 500 dollar range, and,
shortly thereafter, in the 100 – 150 bracket. Much of the growth in bargain astro-video can be attributed to one camera, the LN300. This 1/3-inch chip cam from
China (natch) is based on a design (probably) developed by Samsung, and after
it caught the eye of astro-video experimenters, it was soon being modified and
sold for astronomy by several vendors.

So, which LN300 do you choose? Some variants of the basic
camera have firmware that makes it easier to achieve color in some modes, but
all work very well for astronomy. They are amazingly sensitive and display
little of the dreaded “amp glow,” that brightening of the corner of the frame, that plagues some deep sky cameras. The LN300s also offer other features useful
in astronomy, including the ability to stack up to 5 image frames internally.
That produces smoother and denser images. The maximum exposure of the camera is
about 20-seconds, but thanks to stacking, and, most of all, the sensitivity of these little wonders, that is not a handicap.

Which “brand” of LN300, then? Heretofore, my only advice in
that regard was “Get one from an astronomy dealer.” The main reason for that
was camera control. The stock camera is operated with tiny buttons on its rear.
Those allow you to set exposure and other things, but having to go out to
the scope to push minuscule buttons in the dark is not the way I like to roll.
I prefer to sit under an EZ-Up canopy at a star party or on my deck at home and
operate the camera from there. Luckily, astro-merchants supply LN300s with
wired remotes and/or software for controlling ting the camera from a laptop. So, I told
budding astrovideographers, to just get a camera like that from an astronomy-oriented
dealer. Any dealer.

That’s changed, however, because of what I think is an
incredibly neat little kit and a great buy being offered by Orange County Telescope,
the Revolution Imager. What it is is a
case with everything you need to get started shooting astronomy video
inside: an LN300, a battery powered 7-inch
LCD monitor, a wired remote for the camera, a focal reducer, an IR block
filter, a battery to power camera and monitor, and all required cables.
Darned neat, I think. While video, like any other sort of astrophotography,
can’t be made “turnkey”—it requires practice and learning—having everything you
need and complete instructions for hooking it all up and getting started makes
that learning a heck of a lot easier.

Anyhow, when Orange County’s proprietor, Mike Fowler, asked
if I’d like to try the Revolution, I naturally said yes. At $299.99, I thought
the Revolution could be a major breakthrough. No need to spend about that much
on just a focal reducer and a monitor. No scratching your head as to how to
make it all work together. The more I ruminated on it, the more I thought this
could be the coming of that video astronomy revolution I’d been predicting for a long time.

When the Revolution arrived, I was even more impressed than I’d been just
looking at it on the website and reading its specs. You really do
get a lot of stuff nearly packed and
ready to go. Go where? In my case, the kit went was into the 4Runner for our recent trip to the Deep South Regional Star Gazewhere I hoped to
give the set a good workout.

In astronomy, you don’t always get what you want. You
sometimes get what you need, but you
do not always get what you want.
While I got the DSLR pictures I needed for a magazine article I was working on,
I barely got to try the Revolution. A slow-moving front began to pass through
on Thursday evening, which I’d declared was to be “the night of the
Revolution.” I was able to set the system up, though, and at least give it a short
preliminary test.

Revolution hand control...

Actually, I’d had the good sense to set up the Revolution at
home before we left for DSRSG. One thing that is different about the kit is
that you’ve got a rather complicated looking wiring harness that connects all
the components, camera, monitor, and battery, together. Luckily, the good folks
at OCT have posted a set of excellent instructional videos on the Revolution
website. I watched those, which soon made clear how everything was supposed to
go together. I also printed out the basic camera setting instructions, though I
was fairly familiar with how to work an LN300.

My setup, which you see pictured below, is actually a little more
complicated that what many of you will deal with. Since, as above, I like to
sit under an EZ-Up and operate the scope, I connected a long extension cable between camera and wiring harness. The cable in the kit is long enough to allow
you to set up the monitor a few feet from the telescope, but I wanted longer than
that and had a combo power/video cable at hand that I use with other cameras. I see that OCT now offers a 25-foot extension cable (and some
other cool accessories as well) as an inexpensive option, and that is a good thing.

Some users may be happy having the monitor mounted on the
scope, maybe the upper cage of a Dobsonian, however, and will not need an
extension cable. The Revolution kit includes a tilt-swivel monitor mount with
an adhesive backed base that is perfect for attaching the display to scope
tubes or mountings. Instead, I pasted it to a plastic clipboard, which provides a
steady, sturdy mounting for the monitor.

In addition to an extension cable, I hooked up my Orion
DVR. I like to preserve my deep sky videos, and this tiny digital video recorder works
very well for that purpose. I simply ran the output of the camera to an old
analog switch box left over from the non-digital cable TV days and used that to
select monitor or recorder as desired.

I ran into only two problems on this first night: clouds and tracking. I had the camera mounted
on my “secondary” scope, a C8 and CG5 combo I’d bought along to the star party to
sell, and that telescope was only roughly polar aligned. Oh, I knew that for
good looking stars even with short video exposures you need decent polar
alignment, but the appearance of the skies told me I’d better hurry and I
dispensed with the AllStar polar alignment procedure in the interest of getting
something before we were socked in.
In the end, I had a little over an hour (including some waits for clouds to
pass) to see what the Revolution would do.

My impressions? Most of all, that this is such a sensitive little camera. Didn’t matter
what I turned the C8 to, the camera snapped it up. The Crescent Nebula, the
legendarily dim NGC 6888 in Cygnus? No sweat. Both loops of the Veil? Done.
M74? There were the spiral arms right on the monitor. What was really cool was
setting the camera to stack images. While I’d used LN300s a couple of times before,
that was not a feature I’d played with. It was neat to watch the
supposedly dim Crescent slowly develop on the screen like a photographic print
in Dektol (now I am dating myself).

How did the system work otherwise? Just fine, thank you.
While I wouldn’t call the monitor high resolution, it looked at least as good
as the screen of the portable DVD player I used as a display for years and
which carried me all the way through the Herschel Project. The only thing I didn’t try was the included focal reducer.
I’ve got a Meade f/3.3 reducer for the C8, and while the .5x Revolution reducer
would no doubt have been fine, when dealing with an f/10 8-inch, the more focal
reduction you can achieve, the better.

The kit’s lithium ion battery, by the way, had no problem
powering camera and monitor for an hour and a half, and I suspect would have
been fine for several hours. Not having to worry about an AC source or carrying
around a big jumpstart battery would be an asset for public outreach, and I
believe the cell would easily deliver enough juice for the average public session.

While I didn’t have time to really play with camera
settings, I was nevertheless impressed with my results. The picture of NGC 6888 here is, by the way, just a single frame grab from the video. No additional
processing was done other than minor level adjustments. Believe me, the object
looked even better “live.”

I continued working until the last photons of the Crescent
were extinguished by clouds and building ground fog. I was a little
disappointed, but since I had a trip to the Chiefland Star Party scheduled for
the following week, and hoped to get plenty of hours with the Revolution down Chiefland Way, I didn’t feel too bad.

Crescent from DSRSG..

Alas, once again things didn’t go exactly the way I’d
planned. The basic problem at CSP was that, as I reported a couple of weeks ago, I could only get a motel room for
one night, which limited me to two days. After driving 350 miles, I was willing
to put up with porta-potties and open air showers for one day/night, but no
longer. I did give the camera a try in the waning hours of Friday evening, but
it had developed an intermittent fault in its power cable and I threw in the
towel and went visual, which was fine, if not what I’d hoped for.

One of the benefits of buying the Revolution instead of an
off the shelf camera (which will likely have a substandard built-in IR block
filter installed) from eBay or somewheres
is SUPPORT. Mike fixed the power cable problem quickly and he and his
colleagues took immediate steps to ensure this would not happen to anybody
else. No, $300.00 is not an awful lot of money, but it is some money, and it sure is nice to have support from people who know
astronomy backwards and forwards if there’s a problem.

Back home, clouds kept me indoors for a few days, and
shortly thereafter the Moon was back in the sky. I was anxious
to get the new camera outside again; the encouraging results I’d
gotten at Deep South had just whetted my appetite. But I also wanted to give it as
much of a chance as possible to show what it could do from my backyard, which
has a zenith limiting magnitude value of about 5 or so on a good night. I bided
my time.Finally there came an evening which, while not perfect due to heavy haze that was amplifying the light pollution, was good enough.

One of
the beauties of video is what it can do from the backyard. Video allows you to see so much more from the back-forty than you
can visually. At the club dark site, a 12-inch scope will give you at least a
dim glimpse of the spiral arms of M74, for example, but in the backyard a
20-inch likely won’t show them. Video will. A good deep sky video camera will,
anyway. Would the Revolution, though?

With Sol sinking, I set about getting ready to video. After connecting
up the Rev a few times, I was now clear on what plugs into what on the cable
harness, but it might be helpful if you taped little labels to the connectors
to help in the beginning: “battery,” “camera,” video monitor,” etc. You'll get the idea soon enough, however. Especially if you take the time to watch the aforementioned excellent
videos.

I got all the cables connected to the harness and then mounted the camera on
the C8’s rear port with the all important f/3.3 reducer. If you are using the
included .5 reducer instead, that screws onto the 1.25-inch camera nosepiece, and
the whole thing is inserted into the SCT’s visual back. If you are using
another style of telescope, a reflector or a refractor perhaps, you will do the
same. Screw the included reducer onto the nosepiece and insert the whole thing
into your focuser (be aware some Newtonians will have trouble coming to focus
with any camera).

Backyard Dumbbell...

What did I do then? Next up was goto alignment. Video
cameras have small chips, so a goto mount is pretty much mandatory unless you
want to spend all night getting a few objects onto that tiny sensor. When the
VX mount was goto aligned, I used the guidance of the instructions that came with the camera (and
can also be printed off the website) to set exposure to the equivalent of ½
second, “x33” in LN300 speak. That provided enough oomph to show even
badly out of focus alignment stars as big donuts and also enabled me to get focus at least
roughly “in.” Remember, the reducer will have changed the focus point of your
scope radically from where it probably is with an eyepiece.

How did I get to a menu to adjust exposure? That’s easy
with the Revolution thanks to the camera remote. Push the center button, and a
row of icons will appear on the video monitor. Select the “Exposure” Icon with
the left and right arrow buttons, push the center button again, and following
the instructions, set the camera to auto exposure mode (Sense Up) and give it
that x32. Using the remote was a joy. A
whole lot better than trying to operate the camera with the wee buttons on its
backside.

With the VX mount tracking and focus at least roughly dialed
in, I was ready to begin. What was my first target? An astrophotographer friend
of mine is wont to say, globular star clusters are God’s gift to imagers. She
doesn’t just mean they are photogenic, but that their tiny stars are perfect
for refining telescope focus. M15 was pretty much perfectly placed on this
night, just beginning to descend into the west, so I typed M-0-1-5 into the NexStar HC
and when the motors stopped their whining, had a look at the monitor.

Even in a short exposure, it was obvious we were on target.
There was a suspiciously large "star" near the center of the screen. I upped
exposure to 128x and refined focus. That was easy to do since I have a JMI
motofocus on the C8. Which, like goto, is a huge help. Being able to sit at the
monitor and focus with a remote control is just a boon, let me tell you.

M15 on a poor night...

After M15 was good and sharp, displaying a lovely halo of
tiny little stars on the monitor (the screen grab here doesn’t do it justice),
I began playing with the camera's settings—after running inside and pouring myself
a glass of Merlot to keep me warm in the chilly 40s of the evening. I’ve often
said learning to use an astronomical video camera is a lot like learning to
play a musical instrument. You have to practice with it and try different
things before you get good. While I’ve done a lot of astro-video, this camera
was more or less new to me and I had a bit to learn—actually I still do—to get
the best images out of it that it can produce.

Don’t despair if you are a newbie, though. Just using the
recommended settings in the instructions, which give setups for general deep
sky objects, lunar and planetary, and dim/large DSOs, will get you going. In
general, it’s best to start out with the camera in automatic (Sense Up) mode
before experimenting with manual (Lens/AGC) mode. Going manual is pretty much
required if you want to capture the dim stuff, though.

What challenges did I face on this first extended run with
the camera? It behaved itself very well, and once I’d reacquainted myself with
the menus and settings it just got out of the way. The only problem I ran into
was the brightness of the sky background. It took a while to figure out which
exposures and other settings brought out objects best without washing out the
background too much. That is always the way it is with video in the backyard,
however.

What helped with sky brightness was screwing an Orion
Imaging filter onto the camera nosepiece. This “mild” light pollution filter
darkened the sky background appreciably without dimming star
clusters and galaxies, which will be badly attenuated by stronger light
pollution filters. A similar mild filter like a Lumicon Deep Sky or an Orion
Skyglow will work just as well as a filter sold specifically for imaging.

Yes, I’ve got quite a few deep sky video hours under my
belt, but I believe the Revolution will be easy enough to set up for anyone
capable of following instructions. Mine was soon cranking out pleasing images and I was seeing a heck of a lot more than I’d have seen through the eyepiece
of my 10-inch Dobsonian on this semi-punk evening. Like what?

The Deerlick...

M15: Was very well resolved with tons of tiny stars
shining steadily around its intense core. What was sorta amazing was that I had
to be careful not to overexpose the core with this very sensitive little cam.

M27: was sinking,
but that didn’t prevent the Rev from bringing out some nice reds and greens,
the apple-core shape, and the central star.

NGC 7331: Once I got the exposure just so, I began to
see traces of the galaxy’s sweeping spiral arm, which is quite apparent in the
live video. So are the little nearby NGC galaxies, the “deer” at the big
Deerlick of NGC 7331,

NGC 6888: I
wasn’t surprised to pick up the dim loop of the Crescent Nebula from a
dark star party field, but it was quite a trip to watch it appear on my monitor
in the backyard as the images stacked. Not just as a loop, but as a distinctly red loop.

M74: While I thought it at least possible
that I could have seen a trace of the Crescent visually with my OIII filtered 12.5-inch
Dobsonian on a night like this in the backyard, I knew there was no way in hell
I would have seen the dim arms of the Phantom Galaxy. The sky was now
poor enough that I was not even sure I’d have seen the nucleus. Yet, there were
the arms as the images stacked on the screen (I set stacking to 5 frames and left it there
when I wasn’t focusing). Amazing.

And so it went till the clouds finally rolled in, preventing
me from seeing what the Revolution would do on M42 (or the Horsehead). But that
was OK. I’d seen a lot and been impressed. This is an inexpensive camera, but
that is the beauty of the thing, since it is also a very capable camera. I’ve been doing video since 2003 and the antique Stellacam
II days, but I was admittedly rather taken with this little thing (and plan to
get it to the dark site soon). Two big thumbs up, y’all.

Nota Bene: You can see more pictures of and by the Revolution on my Facebook page...

Sunday, December 06, 2015

Smart Phones + Tablets + Amateur Astronomy: Where we are Now (Part I)

SkySafari

Where are we now
with the devices that not only take up a substantial portion of the waking
lives of many of us, but even threaten to make laptop computers obsolete for
astronomy? Astronomy apps for smart devices are mature, have plenty of
features, and those features are highly competitive with similar laptop/PC
applications. That is not what has changed most, however. What has really changed is
that apps are big now. Astronomy apps are increasingly displayed on devices
with screens large enough to make them truly useful.

I’ve been using smart devices and their predecessors, the
PDAs (Palm Pilots, that is), for over fifteen years, but it has taken this
transition to larger displays to make them really important to me for use in our avocation. Sure, it was fun beaming Palm Pilot observing lists back and forth with
my friend Tom Wideman on the 2001 Texas Star Party
observing field, but PDA astronomy was really just fun. A Palm was not indispensible to me as a laptop had
become.

That didn’t change till just the other day. It began while I was
packing for the Peach State Star Gaze. I was finishing loading Miss Van
Pelt, my Toyota 4Runner, when my iPhone 4s rang. I fished it out of my pocket
to answer while juggling an equipment case in my other hand, fumbled, and
dropped the phone to the concrete floor of the carport. Uh-oh.

Double uh-oh, actually, since the phone was not in a case.
I’d always kept it in an Otterbox, but when that case wore out a year ago, I
hadn’t been able to find a replacement one for my “obsolete” phone locally. In
hindsight I should have ordered one off the Internet, but you know what they
say about that. I picked up the phone expecting to see a cracked screen, but
didn’t. “Huh. Guess the little sucker is tougher than I thought.”

Cut to the Deerlick Astronomy Village a day or two later.
Phone service was spotty, but I was able to get wi-fi, and thought I’d have a
look at the weather predictions for Friday night. Reached in my pocket and
grabbed the phone. Felt kinda funny. Pulled it out and examined it. Yes, the
screen was fine, but the phone’s back was a mass of cracks. It’s made of a
glass-like composite of some sort similar to the screen, and looked like it
would soon be falling to pieces and cutting a hole in my leg if I put it back
in my pocket.

It was clear I needed a new phone. The question was which?
I’ve been impressed by the Android Phones, particularly the Samsung Galaxy, but
my inclination was to stick with the iPhone, which I’ve been using for years. I
was keeping an open mind, though; I’d look at the Galaxy in the store, the ATT
store, and maybe some others—LGs in particular. Heck, I’d even consider a
Galaxy Note.

A Galaxy Note? That enormous mashup of smart phone and
tablet? Yep. I knew the reason why I wasn’t using my smart phone more for astronomy: the
screen. Wasn’t just my aging eyes, either. The minuscule display of
the 4s wasn’t large enough to make star charting apps very practical for use at the scope even for somebody with 20-20 peepers. I wanted big,
and I believed that meant the iPhone 6s Plus or the slightly larger Galaxy Note.

That’s what I thought
until I walked into the store, marched up to the counter, and told the nice and
helpful AT&T guys (alas, that cute Lily from the TV commercials was nowhere
in sight) I was thinking about was the 6s Plus. They said they could do that,
but that if I, like most dudes, carried my phone in a pocket of my jeans, I
really ought to try pocketing a 6s Plus before settling on one. I picked one up
and tried to stick it in my pocket experimentally. No way; just much too big to
carry that way. I don’t like belt cases and am too old-fashioned to start
carrying a men’s’ shoulder bag, so the Plus and the Note were clearly out.

I was disappointed, and the AT&T salespeople could see
that. They said they had a way to assuage my disappointment, though. They offered
me a good compromise. An excellent deal on an iPhone 6s (no Plus) with 64 gigs
AND an Asus 7-inch tablet with Wi-Fi plus cell-tower capability. The 6s is not as
big as a plus, but was much bigger than my 4s, and the tablet was even bigger
than the 6s Plus. I was sold.

Denouement? The phone is great. It is large enough that I
can do many things, including many astronomy things, on it happily. But it is
the tablet that has rung my chimes. The Android operating system’s way of doing
things was not that difficult for me to learn. It’s different from iOS, but not
that different, and I was soon looking at FaceBook and downloading my first Android app
from the Google Play Store, SkySafari
Plus.

There is no doubt SkySafari is and will likely remain the
premier planetarium program for smart devices for the foreseeable future. It
was out of the gate early, and its developers have continued to improve it
steadily. Newcomers like the Bisques’ TheSky for iOS (specifically designed for the
iPad) may gain ground as they mature, but for now SkySafari is it. I just
didn’t realize how it it is till I used the program on the 7-inch Tablet.

In the past. I’d used the basic version of the app on my 4s
and my old iPod Touch occasionally. Usually as an aid to identifying stars in
the gloaming. But use it to find objects or run a telescope? Nope. As above,
just too small. That was obviously going to be different on the tablet. That in
mind, I downloaded the middle version of the app, SkySafari 4 Plus. Its
extremely reasonable price, $14.99, meant that if I didn’t use it that much,
even on the tablet, I wouldn’t be out that much moola. With 2.6-million deep
sky objects and 31,000 deep sky objects, it was at least obvious Plus would be
way more powerful than the basic edition.

SkySafari

As you know if you are a faithful reader, when I’ve done
visual observing lately my tendency has been “simplify, simplify, simplify,”
beginning with my switch to a 10-inch Zhumell Dobsonian, Zelda, from my truss
scope, Old Betsy. I even took it further for a short while, going back to
printed star atlases for a night or two. Which just reminded me how much I hate print star atlases. Hard for me to
read under a dim red light, hard to find stuff, and wonderful for collecting
dew. Still, I didn’t want to drag a freaking 17-inch Alienware laptop out for a
half hour jaunt across the backyard sky. Maybe there was a middleground now…

I had that tablet loaded up with what was an attractive
and legible and detailed planetarium program. Would it work for my visual
observing? Yes it would. One night with the 10-inch and the star clusters of
Cassiopeia showed that.

What was it like using the tablet and SkySafari? It was
sorta like using my old print fave, Sky
& Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas. But better. Mucho better. I could zoom
in as much as I needed. Search for objects easily. Get information about what I
was searching for with a touch and a swipe. Finding DSOs with the scope? The
fact that I could put a Telrad display on the screen made that duck soup. How
was the display dark adaptation-wise? In night vision red it was just right for
the backyard. I might want a red film filter over the screen at a dark site,
though. We’ll see.

Will I be ditching my laptop anytime soon, though? Probably
not. Oh, I might if I could but I can’t yet, and likely neither will you.
Unless you opt for a Windows capable tablet you are stuck for a couple of
reasons. There is no way to control a DSLR or CCD with a tablet or phone
without having a laptop in the mix, not yet, not that I am aware of. I have
little doubt that will happen, but not yet. Also, as you know, I am a big fan
user of planning programs for astronomy. While there are a couple of
rudimentary apps of this type for smart devices, there’s no Deep Sky Planner or
SkyTools, not yet. I’m sure there eventually will be, however, and am frankly astonished that a
powerful one hasn’t appeared yet.

To put it mildly, I was sold on the efficacy of the new
larger screen devices for actual field use in astronomy, and began installing
old and new apps on both the 6s and the tablet. What do I have installed and
what am I using most? Here’s the first batch…

SkyWeek Plus

SkySafari

As above, SkySafari is on the top of the heap when it comes
to planetarium programs for phones and tablets. It even has some (fairly
rudimentary) list making tools. It is beautiful and it is detailed. If you
don’t want to settle for the couple of million stars and thirty thousand DSOs
of Plus, you can up the ante with the Pro version ($39.95), which boasts 27
million stars and over a million faint fuzzies. Believe me, this thing gives up
nothing to PC planetariums.

One thing that gave me pause when I was preparing to buy the
Android version was that I’d heard its performance is not quite as good on that
platform as on iOS. It is even stated on the maker’s (Curriculum Simulations)
website that the app may run slower on Android devices than on iOS ones. That
may be, but the program runs incredibly well on my humble Asus tablet; I don’t
notice any performance difference between Plus on my Android widget and the
basic version on the iPhone.

One other concern some may have regarding the Android
version is that you cannot utilize Sky-Fi, the Wi-Fi system sold by Curriculum
Simulations for wireless control of scopes with SkySafari. Unless you “root” (jail-break)
your phone, you are out of luck. Android devices do not normally support ad-hoc
Wi-Fi networks. The only other out is carrying a Wi-Fi router to the observing
field with you, and who wants to do that?

Luckily there is a non-Wi-Fi alternative for wireless scope
control, the company’s new SkyBT, which allows you to wirelessly control the
scope via Bluetooth widget. Not only does it, I understand, work well and
reliably, it is slightly cheaper than the SkyFi system at $99.95 versus
$109.95. I haven’t thought much about doing this yet, since I am going through
an astrophotography phase and need a laptop in the field, but I might someday.

SkyWeek

Everybody needs to keep up on what’s going on with the sky
week-in, week-out. You can do that with various websites, but why not make it
easy on yourself? This little app from Sky
& Telescope is updated weekly and keeps you apprised of and alerted to sky
happenings (the Plus version can sync with your device’s calendar). Not only do
you get a listing of interesting events, clicking on them will bring up a
little built-in planetarium app (based on SkySafari). Yes, if you are a
SkySafari user the basic version of SkyWeek is built-in to that app, but I find
it handy to have the standalone version, too. It’s certainly cheap enough to
allow even stingy me to do that. The basic SkyWeek is free and the Plus variant
is a mere $2.99 (iOS or Android).

Accuweather Astronomy

Accuweather page

Even before I got my large-screen smart thingies, I did use
my devices in astronomy rather frequently for one thing, checking the weather,
the weather as it pertains to observing. Will it be cloudy or clear? How about
the transparency? Seeing? Normally I use the apps below for that, but I’ve
recently found a rather nice webpage on the Accuweather site, “Accuweather
Astronomy.” It provide stuff like Moon phase and rise/set info, but also, most
interestingly, boils down the weather forecast for your current location into
“poor/fair/good/very good/excellent for stargazing.” I find its predictions to
be quite accurate much of the time.

Scope Nights

A step up from Accuweather is a nice app that also condenses
the forecast into “good/bad for observing,” but in a somewhat easier to use
fashion. No messing with your browser, just click an icon. I like ScopeNights
and have been using it since someone
turned me onto it at a star party a couple of years ago. Only thing I don’t
like about it? It is iOS only. How accurate is it? As accurate as anything
else. Like every other weather app, whether for astronomy or not, there are
misses as well as hits.

Clear Sky Droid and
MyCSC

These apps display the famous astronomy conditions predictor
Clear Sky Charts (nee Clear Sky Clock). Both are much the same in that you can save
your favorite sites and get the CSC graphic display of predicted conditions for
them for the night. MyCSC is a little prettier than Clear Sky Droid, but in the end
they do exactly the same thing, display that CSC bar graph. I prefer Clear Sky
Droid, but only because of the larger display of my tablet. Is CSC more
accurate for astronomy than other weather sources? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like ScopeNights and
Accuweather, there are times when it is on the money and other times when it is
dismally wrong, but that is the nature of weather prognostication.

There is one other weather app (for Android) that I like and
which seems to have a lot of promise, Astro
Panel, which uses the 7Timer service for weather data and tailors that to
astronomy. When it works. Which is seldom. I usually only get “Sorry, problem
connecting to 7timer service.” I’m hoping this one will get fixed out one of
these days.

What else? I have some more interesting apps lined up for
you, including one that, if I get it working might be very, very interesting, Universe2Go. Let us leave all that for
next week or possibly the week after, though. Right now, I hope to get out and
do something I haven’t done in months, actually observe the deep sky from my
club dark site and report on that.

Addendum: Saying Goodbye to Betsy…

If you are a Facebook friend of mine, this won't surprise
you because you probably noticed I recently posted that I was selling my
time-honored 12-inch truss tube Dobsonian, Old Betsy. Why in the name of all that is holy would I do something like
that? If there’s any telescope that I’ve been identified with over the years
other than C8s, it has been that stalwart old Newtonian.

The basic reason was simple. She just wasn’t being used. The
last time the scope cruised the night sky was at the 2014 Deep South Regional
Star Gaze, and after my acquisition of a 10-inch solid tube Dob, Zelda, the chances of me getting Bets under the
stars anytime soon seemed remote. The
10-inch has a good mirror and is much quicker and easier to get going in the
backyard. Another reason for saying “sayonara” was that I am at a time in my
life when I don’t want to feel encumbered,
tied down by things, big things, I don’t need and don’t use.

So Betsy had to find a new home. While I did mention
the telescope’s availability on the FB Newsfeed, I really wanted to sell her
locally and never got as far as posting an ad on AstroMart. Frankly, I let her
go for a very modest sum, but that made sense. I would not have dared to try to
ship her. She’d have to be “pickup only,” or I might, I thought, deliver her within
a reasonable 300 – 350-mile radius. While I probably could have gotten some
bites on that, I would have had to spend gas money on a delivery, and at the
extreme end of that range I’d probably have wanted to stay the night in a motel
before returning home.

So, I let her go for less than I maybe should have, but I
believe she has gone to someone who will use and respect her, and I certainly
got my money out of her over two decades of use and fun. I am so glad that the last time I used her was to revisit and
complete the observing list I used with Betsy on her first star party outing in
‘94. I think that will provide a little closure for me.

Was it easy to let go? No. I set her up in the backyard to
demonstrate for the buyers, a young couple, and while waiting for them to
arrive I turned Betsy to M15. The image in my 8mm Ethos was crazy-good and all
the memories of all the nights Bets and I spent under the stars together came
flooding back. I began to doubt whether I could
let her leave. In the end, good sense prevailed. I have my memories, and Bets
is better off being used and cared for.

That is not the end of my selling either. If you know anyone
who wants a high-toned standard C8, an
RV-6, or a StarBlast, send them my way. For the reasons above, these scopes
simply must go to new homes as well. But don’t be afraid. I am not shutting
down my observing—not hardly. While a bunch of scopes will go before I am done,
Betsy at least has been replaced by a new one that I think I will use a lot. What
is that? All shall be revealed over the next couple of Sundays, friends.